For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For

A shrine in the courtyard at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., features a bust of Edgar Allan Poe.Credit
Clement Britt for The New York Times

RICHMOND, Va. — Edgar Allan Poe took good care of his corpses. They are neatly cut up and craftily stowed beneath floorboards (“The Tell-Tale Heart”); they are walled into ancient catacombs where nothing is likely to disturb their well-earned eternal slumber (“The Cask of Amontillado”); they are encased in coffins that somehow permit them to emerge to take care of unfinished business (“The Fall of the House of Usher”). But the living — some of whom become those corpses — have a much harder time of it. They obsess, brood and hate; they are possessed by bizarre impulses; they wrestle with inchoate forces and often succumb, scarcely knowing the scope of their perversities.

That has pretty much been the fate of Poe as well. This year is the bicentennial of his birth, and while he never earned a secure living, was often sucked into alcoholic maelstroms, was unable to hold a job without incinerating his prospects and regularly lashed out at his literary contemporaries — while in life, in other words, he was a miserable conglomeration of self-justification, remorse, genius, fury and failure — as a corpse he has flourished mightily. And not just because of his inventive creations of the modern detective novel, horror tale and science-fiction story. Contemporary Goth subcultures feed on the themes that ooze from Poe’s work. And celebrations have been widespread and plentiful.

In October in Philadelphia, Poe was feted with the third international conference devoted to his work, where for three days the subjects of discussion included the association of the author with themes like Baroque aesthetics, the sublimity of disease and signs of homosexuality. Biographical documents and images have also been scanned and cataloged this year in association with an exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin. In October in Baltimore, where the 40-year-old Poe was buried in an unmarked grave in 1849 with 10 people in attendance, a plastic Poe in a pine box was given an elaborate funeral in recompense. An active Poe society in Baltimore maintains a rich Web site (eapoe.org). There are at least two scholarly journals devoted to him and, judging from the recent conference, a flourishing academic industry.

In Richmond, where Poe spent nearly a third of his life, a playful, robust exhibition at the Library of Virginia can be seen through Saturday. The objects on display include magazines for which he wrote, an 1850 daguerreotype of the first (and last) woman he said he loved, sheet music based on his poems, Poe dolls and figurines and a rare 1928 expressionist silent-film version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber.

“Poe: Man, Myth, or Monster” is the show’s provocative title, and the library seems to suggest he is all of the above, while shaping a new myth that sees Poe as an ancestor of today’s disenchanted dissenters and popular entertainers, praising him as both “rock star” and “social misfit.” The case is overstated, but this revivification has some bite.

Poe’s failure as a bourgeois writer trying to make his living editing and writing for magazines of the 1830s and 1840s now takes on the aura of success. It marks him as a kind of avant-gardist, haunted by the imminent decay and dissolution of old worlds of high learning and cultivated heritage. Poe becomes a prophet who knows his own house creaks as much as Usher’s. He relishes sounding the rotting foundations; so, perhaps, do his heirs.

But if you really want to feel the potency of the Poe myth, come to the Poe Museum, whose curator, Chris Semtner, also shaped the show at the Library of Virginia. The museum’s literature says that it has “the world’s finest collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s manuscripts, letters, first editions, memorabilia and personal belongings.” It is here, in the oldest house still standing in Richmond (built around 1750) and with a few of the adjacent homes annexed, that the cult of Poe may be said to have its headquarters. The museum’s ramshackle character creates a quaint aura of antique devotion.

Its courtyard is known as “The Enchanted Garden” and is inspired by the one mentioned in Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise” — one of his many invocations of adoration and loss:

Thou wast that all to me, love,

For which my soul did pine —

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.

The garden does indeed contain a fountain and is bounded on one end by an arched brick loggia in which a bust of Poe has pride of place; it is known as the Poe Shrine (as the entire museum was once called). The shrine’s bricks, like those of the garden wall, come from the demolished building of Richmond’s magazine The Southern Literary Messenger, where Poe found his first early success. The granite columns come from the same building. And according to Mr. Semtner, some of the soil used to grow the “fairy fruits and flowers” of the garden came from Poe’s mother’s grave.

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An 1884 Poe volume displayed at the Library of Virginia.Credit
Library of Virginia

Poe himself never had anything to do with this house, though the museum suggests that as a 15-year-old rifleman he may have been in the honor guard that ushered the Marquis de Lafayette here during his 1824 Richmond visit. But it has now become a place saturated in Poe’s life (or death) force.

Like the teeth that one of Poe’s disturbed heroes wrenches from the mouth of his dead lover, personal relics are pried from the wreckage of the past with affectionate devotion: a staircase salvaged from one of Poe’s boyhood homes, a bed he slept in as a boy, a lock of his hair cut by the man who carried Poe to the hospital in 1849, a key to his trunk found in his pocket after his death, his embroidered silk vest, the piano played by Poe’s sister.

This museum, created in 1921 by collectors of Poeanna, has a fascinating collection of documents, but it is the personal that is paramount here, the almost fetishistic promise of contact with this wraithlike figure whose dour face can be seen everywhere. With Poe, literary devotion becomes personal.

But for him it would have all been too little, too late. Poe, according to Poe, is always misunderstood, always unappreciated, always wronged, always forced into literary fisticuffs. When his popular poem “The Raven” was satirized by the American writer Thomas Dunn English as “The Black Crow,” it was part of a Ping-Pong match of vituperation that included a fistfight and a court case. In “The Cask of Amontillado” English may have been transformed into Fortunato, the pompous aficionado of fine wines who is walled up alive. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could,” that story’s narrator begins, “but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

Those who helped Poe often ended up similarly unforgiven. “I loved the old man,” says one of Poe’s narrators. “He had never wronged me.” That’s the old man the narrator dismembers, the man whose tell-tale heart loudly beats under the floorboards.

Poe accepts no governing propriety; his disenchantment is extreme. He may be psychologically torn, pleading for help while repelling it, courting enemies and disdaining friends, but there is also a pride at work, and it is one contemporary admirers often respond to. Poe was a “misfit,” in this view, who shouldn’t have had to fit.

Disenchantment is Poe’s intellectual theme as well. He scorns the Transcendentalists and other American writers with their visions of transformation and possibility. He rejects ideas of moral uplift. The New World holds no promise. But the Old World, in which so many of his stories are steeped — the realm of old families, cultivated tastes and long traditions — is also corrupt and rotten.

Poe seemed to enshrine reason as the only plausible authority, creating in his famous detective stories an archetypal model later used by Arthur Conan Doyle. Poe’s hyper-rational detective Dupin is a master of reason. But he uses it to lay bare the brutish, disruptive forces lying underneath its polished surface, just as he deduced the existence of the rampaging orangutan on the Rue Morgue. Poe’s madmen are singularly rational. His reasonable men are singularly mad. Reason is not to be fully trusted.

This mixture of disenchantment and dissent made intimately personal helps Poe seem like an early modernist. He shuns reliance on a higher order and rejects the comfort of divine retribution. Vengeance is his; he will repay. Perhaps we should be grateful most of the retribution was kept on the printed page, leaving us free for sentimental adoration.

“Poe: Man, Myth, or Monster” is on view through Saturday at the Library of Virginia, 800 East Broad Street, Richmond; (804) 692-3500. The Poe Museum is at 1914-16 East Main Street, Richmond; poemuseum.org.

A version of this review appears in print on December 1, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe